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Sunday, 1 December 2013

A + X, Volume 1: Awesome! Review (Dan Slott, Marvel)

A + X is a collection of short stories teaming up a member of the Avengers and the X-Men for a silly throwaway kind of story. Some stories tend to be more serious than others like Dan Slott’s Captain America/Cable teamup in WW2 where the two defeat Sentinels Bolivar Trask is burying in England and then you have stories like Peter David’s Wolverine/Captain Marvel where they play poker the entire time!

I was wary about picking this one up purely because I disliked AVX so much and thought that by association (kind of) it’d be awful too, but it’s not a bad little read. Some of the team-ups are fun and the quick done-in-one format opens up all kinds of possibilities, like the stories I mentioned earlier. Slott and David’s stories were both quite good, as was Kathryn Immonen’s Iron Fist/Doop team-up (I like any comic featuring Doop), which take the opportunity to tell some pretty funny, whacky stories. Storm and Black Panther have a race, Black Widow and Rogue have a spa day (which of course is disrupted by a bad guy), and Hulk and Wolverine fight about who gets the last slice of cake!

Though if you’re not into the team-up or story, it can be a bit of a slog to get through. The Spidey/Beast team-up where they go to a parallel universe run by Beast’s descendants should’ve been more fun but was just all about the set-up and turned out to be a snooze, as was the Cap/Quentin Quire story set in Cap’s mind (or something). It’s like any short story collection where some stories are inevitably better and worse than others.

A + X is an ok melange of characters and ideas, with some stories worth reading and others not so. By the end, the format of the collection became somewhat tedious and I wanted to read a longer, more substantial narrative instead. But for dipping in and out of, A +X isn’t bad.